The installation of “Smart Building” technologies is rapidly becoming the norm in both new construction and in modernization of legacy buildings. It has been estimated that in the United States alone, $289 billion worth of building efficiency investment would produce savings in excess of $1 trillion in operating expenses. Every dollar invested in these Smart Building technologies returns $3 in savings. The savings are primarily in energy (climate control), electricity usage (lighting) and water usage. Layered on top of this is the need in many buildings for enhanced security and safety systems, which systems may add significant expense.
Various companies have been working on providing Indoor Position System (“IPS”) solutions for the past two decades with varying degrees of accuracy, cost and reliability. Some companies, such as Ekahau and AeroScout, use active Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags that occupants wear to determine when an occupant passes a RFID reader (receiver). The accuracy of this approach is limited to the number of receivers available through the building, which is often cost limited. For secure environments where radio frequency emissions are restricted to prevent unauthorized information access and possibly data manipulation, RFID approaches are not practical. Other companies, such as Meridian and Accuware, rely on the use of mobile phones for IPS. There are several ways that this can be accomplished, such as the use of WiFi access points and Bluetooth technology, both of which falls under the class of Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) that involves the measurement of signal strength or power levels of radio signals to calculate distance from anchor objects. Lately, companies such as Apple, Google, and Awarepoint are popularizing a particular approach called Bluetooth Beaconing, which utilizes the Bluetooth Low Energy standard. The density and quantity of Bluetooth beacons and WiFi access points is critical to the accuracy of this approach, and as such serves as its major limitation. Other non-RF based techniques, such as passive infrared and acoustic occupancy sensing are also available on the market, but these approaches are only suitable for zone/room occupancy detection and not the fidelity and discrimination required for occupant tracking. Companies such as GeoVision use computer vision techniques to detect occupants through surveillance feeds at key points within the building. However, this approach can be among the most expensive, costing over 3 times that of competing solutions. Another company, Savi Technology, employs frequency shift keying (FSK), and their technology is primarily used for asset tracking within the DoD.